At a charity event, instead of just saying, ‘Give us your money’, I recited from my Dante translation

Bob Geldof and Midge Ure pictured in London during the recording of the Band Aid single Do They Know It’s Christmas? Photograph: Larry Ellis/Getty Images

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People that I hoped would be there for ever have begun to vanish. Lord Weidenfeld was never my publisher, but he took a flattering interest in my work, almost as if he had read it. He hadn’t, of course, he was far too busy: but in every conversation I had with him, he lavished on me a verbal catalogue of authors he thought I should chase up. He had the most magic bookshelves I ever saw, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that his collected Shakespeare was a signed copy. His gusto and gift for making people feel important turned even the most fleeting social encounter into an artistic event.The obituary in Der Spiegel got him exactly right: it said that he could make a small occasion into a great experience. “This is the way I was always meant to live,” he once told me, “sitting in a Vienna cafe surrounded by poets and intellectuals.” We were in an open-air bar in Italy, and there was nobody there but the two of us.

But at least Weidenfeld had a long life.The Australian scientist Bob Carter died far too young. The climate change orthodoxy can be a tough proposition to be sceptical about if you mind being accused of betraying ..........

Now when she and I ask each other questions, both of us pause before answering. It’s a space conversation

Tim Peake takes a selfie in space. Photograph: Tim Peake/PA

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Too suddenly gone, Sir Terry Wogan was the most charming after-dinner speaker I ever heard, partly because his outrageous jokes were delivered in such a civilised voice. I suppose Russell Brand would like to sound like that too, but you have to be born to it, which probably means being born in Ireland. Guiltily, I have been wondering if Wogan would have preferred to hang around a bit, rather than being taken so quickly. With his well-stocked mind, he could have used the extra time well.

I understand their impatience, because I sometimes share it, especially in a week that features three separate trips to the hospital, one of them for the lung function clinic in which I have to half-swallow the mouthguard of a plastic tube and breathe out with full force. The force is never sufficient ..........

In my career as a television interviewer, Nielsen was up there with William Shatner as the funniest man I ever met

Nielsen’s first starring role was in Forbidden Planet. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features

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I’ve been reading The Tempest again. I suppose that if Shakespeare were writing it now, he would have to call it The Extreme Weather Event, but in those days the language was in better shape. No poetry has ever been more beautiful than Prospero’s “Our revels now are ended” speech, which is likely to ring bells for any old man getting set to quit the world. Caliban, however, sounds so like an internet troll that he could easily be updated into a modern version. It’s not necessarily a doomed task. Back in 1956, Forbidden Planet, one of the first big-budget sci-fi movies, drew on the characters of The Tempest to thicken the plot. I saw it several times in a row, and not just because Anne Francis as Altaira looked so fetching in the short tunic that was probably standard wear for post-pubescent females millions of miles from Earth. Only just post-pubescent myself, I didn’t realise that Altaira was based on Miranda and that her father, Dr Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), was based on Prospero. The ideas of the movie were too fascinating to need the help of a literary context. The planet’s invisible beast – it made hideous footprints in the dust as it came thumping on inexorably to attack our boys – was a brilliant notion. None of them suspected that it was their own id, multiplied in its power by the machinery of the vanished Krell! I didn’t need to know that the beast was an updated Caliban ..........

At our weatherboard infants’ school in the bush, the memorably severe Miss Cashman had to get us to safety when the bushfire came

Photograph: Keith Pakenham/AFP/Getty Images

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Our poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, writes poems that must be blessings for schoolteachers, because almost every line has a splinter of brilliance in it, and even the most resistant pupil would notice a fragment of language jumping into life. Her poem called Mrs Midas evokes the difficulties for a wife whose husband turns things to gold when he touches them. They can’t sleep together, so she puts him in the spare room, which he turns into “the tomb of Tutankhamun”. What young mind would not be captured by an idea as dazzling as that? I know, the young mind of the boy at the back of the class who has just set fire to his desk. He’s a kind of Midas himself, but whatever he touches turns to chaos. It’s always rude to be optimistic on behalf of other people, and the teacher is facing difficulties every day that leave Mrs Midas looking genuinely well off, instead of just weighed down by useless wealth. At our weatherboard one-room infants’ school in the bush, the memorably severe Miss Cashman had to get us to safety when the bushfire came, as it did every year, invariably threatening to burn down the building. She had a gift for discipline but no gift for tact. She gave me a note for my mother, saying that I didn’t have to come to school the next day because it had been largely destroyed by fire. My mother, once she had been assured that I had not been in danger, recovered in a matter of hours. ..........

Australia’s journalists are still trying to marshal the communications skills to cope with the continuing story about the teenage Melbourne jihadist

‘How could anyone have emerged from the Australian school system believing a kangaroo could be induced to bounce in the right direction?’ Photograph: Paul Kane/Getty Images

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Out in Australia, which can be safely regarded as the premier laboratory for developments in the English language, there has been a newspaper report about a class in communications. The class took place on a bus, and the journalist who conducted it was quoted as saying the following: “Our friend Danielle narrated the experience of losing her virginity to us all on the bus.” Did she really say it that way, or did a subeditor help?

Either way, I fear that when the current generation of journalists in Australia have got through with teaching the next generation how to communicate, any journalists left over who still know how to say what they mean will be labelled rightwing. Among my own regular trolls, it is the Australians who are most likely, whenever I stress the indispensability of punctuation and grammar, to call me a mouthpiece of the war-criminal Tory establishment. .

Several of these choleric experts correctly accused me of not being a scientist. My only field of expertise is the use and abuse of language; but a trained ear for empty rhetoric is what tells me that most of them aren’t scientists, either. People who call carbon dioxide “carbon” know even less about science than I do. Their anger, I suspect, is driven by belief rather than knowledge.

Let’s be fair and say that people can harbour an irrational belief and still be rational in other respects. That’s what I would like my critics to think about me, so I strive to think the same about them; and anyway, it takes that kind of generosity to fit the historic facts. Sir Isaac Newtonwas rational about celestial mechanics, but quite nutty about numerology

Americans want their teeth to prove that eternal youth is a social obligation

Photograph: Holger Scheibe/Corbis

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This winter I’ve hardly stirred out of doors. I can’t walk far and it takes me two minutes to get out of a taxi. But this week I had a dental appointment. I went to it, wondering why: for someone in my condition, keeping a date with the dentist is a testimony to one’s faith in doctors. You have to bet that the stuff the doctors do will give you enough extra time to show off the stuff that the dentist does. What do you want for the 10 minutes you’ve got left, a smile like George Clooney’s? Trigger warning: there will be teethist remarks in this essay.

I’m lucky with my dentist. He plays good jazz records in the background and his hygienist, when she’s got my mouth jacked open, asks only simple questions. “Did you seeSkyfall on TV last night?” she asks. “Ngh,” I reply. Her assistant asks harder questions (“What did you think of Javier Bardem’s teeth?”), but is starting to realise that a strangled cry might mean that I am croaking. Basically, nowadays, I don’t mind a visit to the dentist, whereas when I was young I minded like hell. But even now I can’t see the point of the big white set of American teeth.

The Americans can’t see the point of anything else. They want their mouths to prove that eternal youth is a social obligation.

To have the authentic gift of vulgarity, you need to have a talent for spoiling your own effects

Lady Gaga at Super Bowl 50. Photograph: Christopher Polk/Getty Images

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In Bucharest, the vast palace once occupied by Nicolae Ceausescu and his deadly wife Elena has been opened to the public, so that the common people of Romania may now tour the strained opulence of its rooms and contemplate how their erstwhile leaders robbed them. I watched the news footage, but was less disgusted than I had hoped. Confidently expecting bad taste at the level of Saddam Hussein’s golden toilets, I had to admit that the general effect was merely boring, like being led from one antique dealer’s warehouse to another without the benefit of lunch. It was all her, of course, but it could have been worse. Only the indoor swimming pool attained a memorable wrongness, adding a chlorinated echo to the laboriously grouted display of polychromatic tiles. Everything else hovered blandly in the gap between plush and tat. Elena was a snake, but she didn’t have the authentic gift of vulgarity.

I’ve been making plans for yet another in the string of springs that I never expected to see

‘Daffodils were being joined by searching bursts of crocuses.’ Photograph: Geoffrey Swaine/Rex/Shutterstock

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In the oncology clinic at Addenbrooke’s, my latest blood test went pretty well, but I got a bit down in the mouth anyway, because for someone in my condition, even a good result is a reminder that you have to go on throwing a double six to stay in the game. In the cab home, however, gloom was soon dispelled by the sight of the flowers in the lawns of the college “backs”, so called to help foreign visitors grasp the Cambridge concept of a back yard that looks better than anybody else’s front yard.

Some of the daffodils had been on display for weeks, but now they had tripled their numbers and were being joined by searching bursts of crocuses, erupting like Byzantine tracer through the grass. Or perhaps Botticelli’s Primavera girl had just gone dancing through, or Matilda from Dante’s Earthly Paradise. Or perhaps they were just crocuses. Good of them, though, to arrive just in time for me to notice.

Back at home, I began to make my plans for yet another in the string of springs that I never expected to see.

My granddaughter has departed for a holiday in the country, and I am left in charge of her two gerbils. They live in a gerbilarium, a two-storey box full of the gear they need to eat, sleep and run. They run, one at a time, in a wheel that rattles. Gerbil Gables, as I call their dwelling, sits in a corner of my kitchen, near the doors to my garden. As I write this, I can hear the rattling wheel.

Gerbils rate high for cuteness. I am reminded of the ultra-little Philippine tarsier, except that the tarsier spends most of the time sleeping instead of running. Generally, I have always been suspicious of cuteness. In the Hermitage in Leningrad in 1976, I saw a tiny silver Fabergé train that had been presented to one of the children of the tsar. It looked too precious to play with. Delicacy can be overdone. If gerbils slept like tarsiers, I would like them less. As things are, these two might as well be on nandralone: they pound that wheel until it threatens to disintegrate. One minds cuteness less if it hangs tough.

But tough cuteness must be credible. In the movies, it hardly ever is. Watching the lovely Elizabeth Debicki in The Night Manager, I just knew that she would end up getting tortured. It had to happen so that we would finally believe that Hugh Laurie was evil, and not just a friend of Stephen Fry. But the torture inflicted nothing except a tiny mark just below her cheek. One recalls how, in Salt, Angelina Jolie emerged from ages of North Korean torture with a slightly split upper lip.

‘Geldof speaks with such precise intelligence that he brings out the strength of the great poet’s verbal music.’ Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA

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Trigger warning: this essay contains heteronormative material. As a sick man whose internal clock is so out of whack that it ticks in no other direction except towards silence, I am often up late in search of junk TV shows and bad movies that will lull me to sleep. In that condition I am grateful even for Steven Seagal movies, some of which could lull a charging herd of wildebeest. But there is a danger, when clicking among the scrapyard channels, that I will be suddenly confronted with those ephebic 118 twins who run around, pause, pose and run around again. Full of benevolence in my declining hours, I want to see nobody done out of a job, but I have to say that I had been expecting these two to be gone by now. Instead, they are still there. Only last night, while Steven Seagal was preparing to beat up an army of yakuza, the 118 twins were there again, running, pausing and posing. In one of these pausing poses they both pointed their bottoms at me. Imagine something totally uninteresting and then double it. ........

It was either in the teleprompter script or in the crawler along the bottom of the screen – probably the latter – that NBC News conveyed the following information: “Isis fighters are shaving bears and hiding in civilian homes to avoid airstrikes.” The reason I can’t be absolutely certain is that I read the line quoted somewhere in the blogosphere, where mistakes made by the traditional media are a constant source of glee. A satirical website with a staff of two young male deadbeats and a woman in a hat can thus rejoice in ridiculing a television outlet with a budget of millions.

And so the shaved bears pass on into history. The day might come when some unusually clueless scientific group is inspired to publish a landmark paper about the shaved bears (“Climate change makes more bears lose hair, says new study”) but it’s more likely that the misprint will continue to be seen as a mistake. It’s the best that any writer can hope for: that the misprint will be flagrant enough to look like one, instead of subtly changing his meaning. ........

‘Redford got so bored by his own beauty that he would go off and direct something. Affleck probably has the same motivation, but he has a lot more directorial flair’ Ben Affleck in Argo. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

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My copy of the 2012 Ben Affleck movie Argo lay around unwatched for a long time. A few nights ago, I fought my way in through the shrink-wrap and took a look. It revealed Affleck to be a terrific director as well as a fine actor.

That latter quality was probably the reason I had left the shrink-wrap intact for so long. In Pearl Harbor, Affleck had overcome the handicap of his absurd good looks and done a creditable job of bringing to life his role as a brave young pilot, instead of doing what the script deserved and setting fire to it before placing himself under citizen’s arrest for having signed the contract in the first place.

The movie was such a dog’s dinner that I couldn’t stop blaming Affleck for being in it. Though he had acted superbly as a has-been B-movie superhero in Hollywoodland, I still had to be persuaded at gunpoint to watch Gone Baby Gone, which proved that he had immense talent as a director. But, for me, Affleck was still the too-handsome actor who had been in that awful movie where a thousand Japanese aircraft tried to destroy Kate Beckinsale’s career. The only reason I finally took a look at Argo was that I was planning to write an article about Alan Arkin.

Take a look at Arkin in Argo (so my article might start), and ........

Wood’s central power was an infallible ear for the nuances of the national language

‘Victoria Wood was a genius who wanted to turn everyone else in the studio into a genius, too.’ Photograph: Mike Marsland/WireImage

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In taking so long to say something about Victoria Wood’s early death, I fear that I’m making an entrance at the wrong time, like Mrs Overall in Acorn Antiques. Not that Mrs Overall was ever afraid of getting her timing wrong. That was the whole point of her. No amount of evidence that she was always arriving at the wrong moment with a tray of tea that nobody wanted could ever stop her doing it again.

Binge-watching the whole delirious archive of Acorn Antiques from the first bungled moment to the last, I’ve just noticed that Mrs Overall is almost always on screen somewhere. If not advancing with the tea tray, she’s hovering somewhere near the back of the set, poking her head out from behind an antique. She’s a mobile fixture.

Victoria, on the other hand, is not often in the shop, except in spirit. She was like that. I knew her when she was just starting off, and it was clear even then that she was a whole new kind of star, with so much creative imagination ..........

At the recent Met Gala in New York, all the stellar people were dressed to kill, and as I scan the gallery of red carpet photographs, I finally realise who Donatella Versace has been trying to turn herself into with her successive bouts of facial alteration. Now, the piecemeal transformation completed, she makes you wonder how Mike Tyson can look so good in a ballgown.

I can’t mock her, because in recent times I am no stranger to the plastic surgeon myself. Every time a carcinoma is removed from somewhere on my head, the hole gets plugged with a graft from somewhere else on my body. Apart from the prospect of ending up upside down, there is also the disturbing consideration that, with proper planning, I could have been turning myself into someone better looking. Bradley Cooper was at the gala, too, and looking great.

There was a time when I thought Tom Berenger was the ideal of male beauty, with a perfect shy smile. In that strangely lovely thriller Someone To Watch Over Me, when he and Mimi Rogers kissed each other, it was like the meeting of true mouths. But for later roles he thought his mouth needed surgical enhancement,

…In the US, it’s a reason to hand names to the FBI The US attorney general, Loretta Lynch. Photograph: Patsy Lynch/Rex/Shutterstock

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Last week there were several sunny days in succession, arousing hopes that a teasingly hesitant spring might finally be arriving. A few birds showed up. One neat little bird that perched for a full minute in my maple tree was identified by a bird-wise friend as a coal tit. Provocatively, I suggested that, in view of the current hostility to anyone still evincing tolerance of fossil fuels, it might be better to call it a renewables tit. The bird flew off and my expert friend went home, leaving me trembling at the daring of my own heresy.

One of my most easily angered critics has been posting tweets, railing against my “climate blindness”. Already hard to please by my work in general, he says that the occasional remarks in which I flaunt my “science denial” have tested his patience “to the limit”. I am left to guess what he might do if his patience is tested beyond the limit. If he shows up at my door in a tank, I could try engaging him in a discussion of the renewables tit I just saw in my garden. Or I could try calling the police.

The latter option might still be possible in Britain, where it is not yet against the law to be frivolous about the oncoming disaster

Even the best poets would be in career trouble without the occasional grant or award Clive James photographed next to his maple tree last year. Photograph: Alicia Canter for the Guardian

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My maple tree, about which I wrote a poem saying it would outlive me, is suddenly half dead and soon might be fully so. Yesterday, looking like a demoralised triffid, it was taken away in a van to a clinic for sick maple trees. Its chances are not great. Meanwhile, squadrons of trolls are preparing their epigrams about my presumptuous misreading of the future. Embarrassing? Totally.

But having guessed wrong about my immediate death, I must be careful about forecasting the same fate for the tree. Perhaps it can be fixed. The treatment, however, will cost a few bob. I have considered writing another poem on the subject, but poems don’t make much money. This fact is well known in my native Australia, where the Council for the Arts is a haven for progressive intellectuals self-tasked with the mission to redistribute the money of taxpayers, who might waste it, among creative “communities”, which are sure to. Careful provision is made for the community of poets.

Since the market for poetry is so small, even the best poets would be in career trouble without the odd grant or award. I have never had much official help myself, but I got the beginnings of a free education, so have nothing to complain about. And anyway, most council grants go to institutions, not individual artists.

When we were kids in quest of a tan, we would lie around forever being cooked by ultra-violet rays, and the results show up around now in the form of skin cancers

Alien, 1979. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar/20th Century

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At 4.30 in the morning, I woke with a tongue bigger than my mouth. I couldn’t swallow anything, not even water. But I could breathe, and the last time something like this happened, it went away by itself. So, although I felt as if I were swallowing a pillow, I decided not to bother anybody until a decent hour.

By 7.30, it felt as if I were swallowing two pillows and a duvet, so I phoned my daughter, who lives next door. “Dough neeb do banigh,” I explained, “bud I migh neeb do go do hothbidal.” She helped me pack a shoulder-bag in case I needed to stay in.

At the Addenbrooke’s A&E unit, I was glad to have her with me as a translator when I told the doctors on duty that one of the drugs in my bag was vital and that I hadn’t been able to take my morning dose yet. Try saying that with two pillows and a duvet in your mouth, plus a soft sofa. But eventually the intravenous drugs worked my tongue loose, and after about nine hours we were going back the other way. The whole family, including my granddaughter’s dog, was waiting at home to tell me in turn that if it happened again, I should yell for help straight off.

The next day I spent resting up for, guess what, a trip to Addenbrooke’s, where I was due to be examined by the dermatologists prior to.............

Should I change profession to something useful? Does the same thought ever occur to, say, Bruce Willis Does Bruce Willis ever wonder whether it is too late to train as a doctor? Photograph: Allstar/20th Century Fox

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Slow to recover after my recent medical emergency, I have spent several days on my back pondering what life is for. Is it for doing more of what I have already done, or should I change profession to something useful? Does the same thought ever occur to, say, Bruce Willis? As he changes his vest for the next scene in A Good Day to Die Hard Again or Die Hard With Pursed Lips, is he wondering whether it is too late to train as a doctor? At which point I, having been trained as a journalist, check up to make sure that he was not trained as a doctor. If he was, I would need to change the previous sentence to have him wondering about whether it was too late to train as a fireman. Restlessly I remember The Towering Inferno, in which Steve McQueen played a fireman: presumably from choice, possibly out of the exhausted artist’s deep longing to do something useful....